Why Stop At Tobacco? Let's Go After All The Sins Of Society

WASHINGTON — When the surgeon general issued his 1964 report on smoking, 42 percent of Americans smoked. Today the figure is 26 percent. The campaign against smoking is the most successful exercise in mass behaviorial change in our time.

There has been no public health success like it since Prohibition. Yes, Prohibition: It was a law enforcement disaster but a public health triumph. The decline it caused in cirrhosis and alcoholic psychosis was dramatic. And alcohol consumption did not reach pre-Prohibition levels again until 1971.

In the end, however, Prohibition failed because it overreached. The modern prohibitionists have learned the lesson. This time, no grand measures like global bans and constitutional amendments. The strategy, far more insidious, is gradualism.

The campaign is now in its second phase. Phase 1 was the propaganda phase. Years ago, I asked then-Surgeon General Julius Richmond how he liked his job. "Wonderful," he replied, "except that I get a bit tired stamping all those cigarette boxes." Those stamps had a remarkable deterrent effect. But even more important was the ban on TV advertising.

This flagrant violation of free speech worked splendidly. It worked not only directly, depriving young people of the subliminal image-driven imperative to puff, but indirectly as tobacco aversion worked its way into free media. When cigarettes began to disappear from TV shows and the lips of movie stars, the deglamorization of tobacco was under way. Its decline became inevitable.

Now, however, we are in Phase 2. Phase 1, propaganda, banned images of smoking. Phase 2, repression, bans smoking itself-in restaurants, theaters, airplanes, offices. The result, writes Peter Berger in the current Commentary, is the phenomenon of the furtive smoker sneaking a sidewalk drag, looking guilty and ashamed. Berger is alarmed that smokers have taken this lying down. He sees their surrender as a sign of the decline of American individualism, a capitulation to the new class of social engineers eager to run society and reform the citizenry by their own liberal lights.

Berger's point is well-taken. The tobacco campaign is an extraordinary example of official repression in the service of social engineering. Unlike Berger, however, I like the result. I'm even willing to pay for it with a bit of repression. In fact, we could use more of it.

With tobacco such a success, why do the reformers stop there? Why not go after alcohol with similar vigor? TV sports, for example, are one long paean to the glories of drink, interrupted by the occasional forward pass or double play. It is scandal that teens and preteens should learn to want beer while watching baseball on TV.

If tobacco advertising can be banned from TV, why not alcohol? Alcohol is an addictive drug and its consequences are as devastating as tobacco's. In fact, it has short-term consequences-traffic deaths, domestic violence-that tobacco is entirely free of. And its long-range consequences are devastating: $13 billion in direct medical costs, $37 billion in lost productivity, and over 100,000 premature deaths every year.

Moreover, for all the loose and disingenuous talk about the dangers of second-hand smoke, alcohol is even less a private affair than tobacco. Addiction to alcohol, unlike tobacco, causes psychological derangement and pathological behavior that devastates not just individuals but whole families.

And while we are at it, why not go after other vices? We could sorely use, for example, a tobacco-like campaign of disapproval and stigmatization of fathers and mothers who produce illegitimate children they have no desire or capacity to care for.

Indeed, the really interesting question about the current anti-smoking mania is: Why just smoking? The answer, I think, is this: For the liberal reformer, smoking is politically safe. It is harmful but value-free; a mere vice, not a sin. Cigarettes poison only lungs, not character; they have no moral content.

Singling out tobacco is politically expedient but socially irrational. If we are going to repress, let's be equal opportunity repressors. Let's go after those things that wreck not just bodies but character, that ruin not just the individual but entire families and communities.

Instead, we get a surgeon general who is so reconciled to teen sex that she wants driver's ed supplemented by back-seat ed. And who opines that we ought to study the legalization of drugs. At the same time, she and the rest of the reformist establishment come down with ferocious energy against tobacco. She is quite reconciled to kids having sex in the back seat of a car, it seems, so long as they don't light up afterwards.

One has to be a little distrustful of a mentality that goes after tobacco, which is morally neutral, harmless to cognition and does not cause half the familial and communal damage that alcoholism, drug abuse and illegitimacy do. If the self-righteous social engineers could only muster the same repressive energy against the morally charged vices that they do against the morally neutral ones, they might actually give repression a good name.